The present invention relates generally to disc drive data storage systems. More particularly, the present invention relates to a head slider having a transducer recessed such that it is protected by a cavity formed in the ceramic slider body substrate in order to reduce asperity sensitivity.
The data density of a high-performance disc drive is highly dependent upon the separation distance between the recording head and the recording surf ace. Currently, this separation distance is maintained by tightly controlling manufacturing tolerances of the components, such as the heads and the discs. Even with these tight tolerance controls, there are increasing instances of the magnetoresistive (MR) element striking asperities on the disc. These asperities have several sources, some of which include particles embedded on the disc, blisters on the disc, surface contamination from the disc drive assembly process, smears and contamination.
When an MR element strikes an asperity, there occurs a momentary heating of the MR element which increases the resistance of the MR element. This increase in resistance leads to errors in the readback data signal. Improvements have been made to reduce the level of thermal asperities that impact the drive performance. These improvements include disc surface finish, correction algorithms in the electronics, and increasing the spacing or distance between the MR element and the disc surface (either by increasing the fly height or by increasing the recession of the MR element). While these improvements have been sufficient in the past, the laws of physics dictate that the spacing distance between the MR element and the disc surface must be reduced in order to increase the data density on the disc. Therefore, a method of protecting the MR element while reducing the fly height of the head and/or the depth of the recession of the MR element would be a significant advance in the art.